Weekly Ship: Hello from 18F! - 18F/noaa-nwm-pa GitHub Wiki

Hello all!

We at 18F are excited to dive in and get to work understanding the National Water Model, setting up and defining how we communicate, and getting to know y’all! If this is your first introduction to 18F, here’s six quick introduction slides which talk a little about Path Analysis projects and what that looks like for our next 8 weeks.

Our asks of you

  • We’re looking at 8am–12:30 on Thursday, Oct 24 for an onsite in Silver Spring while Trey is in town. Please block this time to be present in person if possible, and stay tuned for updates.

Who we are

  • Peter is a Consulting Engineer with 18F who’s background in seismology included FORTRAN90 work before he pivoted to systems engineering and operations. He’s excited to catch up on the state of HPC and modeling for this engagement.
  • Andrew is also a Consulting Engineer (and the Project Lead for this project). He has experience in designing software architecture for radiology software systems and enjoys learning new programming languages — he’s excited for his first foray into FORTRAN.
  • Kathryn is an Account Manager with 18F. She will be focusing on the scope of this work, the timeline, budget and deliverables while also supporting the 18F/NOAA relationship.
  • Mark is a Contracting Lead with 18F, and will be providing acquisition support. He is a former Contracting Officer at the Census Bureau, and looks forward to lending a hand.

You’re reading the Weekly Ship, our weekly place to touch base with you, share what we’re working on, and get your thoughts and feedback.

This week

  • We set up our GitHub repository for collaboration and Trello board to track our work. If you don’t have access to either, just reply to this email and we’ll get you squared away!
  • Our partner Slack channel is also up for day-to-day updates, feedback and Q&A. Please also let us know your preferred email for an invite.
  • Following our initial project kickoff last week, we had intro calls with Ken and Nels.
  • We prepared transcription services for use in research interviews.

Risks to keep an eye on

  • If we can’t loop Trey back in immediately after he’s back in office on Oct 15, we may be delayed from moving forward on defining the refined problem space we’re working on, and the project’s success metrics.
    • We hope to sync with Trey on Oct 15 to mitigate this risk.
  • If we can’t define our refined problem statement and project success metrics until our Oct 24 onsite we risk limiting the amount of time we can perform research and the usefulness of our recommendations.
    • We hope to define our initial problem statement and initial success metrics before our Oct 24 onsite to unblock research, and adjust them as needed during the onsite.

Next up

  • Determine (as best we can) Trey’s availability for meeting to align on the project the Oct 15.
  • Align on a workable process for doing research and document it in a research plan
  • Perform desk research on:
    • The National Water Model and WRF-Hydro
    • How other science communities are approaching large-scale modeling
  • Continue informal background conversations to get a better idea of the problem space.
  • Align Mark and Ken on contracting conversations.

Graphic depicting the project timeline, showing the project is in background research phase.

Thanks,

  • Peter, Andrew, Kathryn, and Mark